In the last years, the evolution of advanced digital telecommunications techniques, the fall of the costs for many of the information and communication technologies and the wide spread of Internet have enabled the development of the so called Information Society. In this environment, the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) means to support medical needs which have specially had a great influence on the field of e-health. The use of multimedia systems to support e-health applications and new, highly sophisticated medical equipments are just two examples of the advances in this area.

In the actual social and medical context, marked by the rapid advance of telecommunication technologies which exposes the telemedicine applications to obsolescence, a policy of global standardization of all fields related to telemedicine could bring benefits like cost reductions and long-term investments without fear of depreciation. Other important advantages that make standardization completely necessary to guarantee the success of e-health applications are:

• Interoperability and compatibility, making easier the exchange of data among heterogeneous sources and facing the problem that most of the solutions up to now have been developed unfortunately on a proprietary basis so that it remains difficult and frustrating to put systems together.
• Public knowledge, fair competition and proper quality of performance, as the finally recognized standards should be freely available and continuously updated and upgraded by in charge working groups.

Ideally, suitable specifications – ITU and otherwise – would be internationally recognized as appropriate for e-Health applications. However, a basic consensus between standards development and later standards implementation is obviously needed. Looking for solutions along these lines, Q28/16 agreed in January 04 to develop an ITU-T Standardization Roadmap for Telemedicine. This Roadmap aims at defining the areas in which open global international standards for e-health applications are currently needed.

Before identifying these gaps, the Roadmap reviews the present situation and points out the main trends and future challenges. A key factor in each of the sections of the Roadmap is to review the proposed or already existing approaches before suggesting new solutions. The final version of this Roadmap shall provide the following:

• How technical, clinical and administrative processes are actually implemented, analyzing related best practices and former disappointing solutions and results.
• Describes how the processes are intended to work in the future, taking into consideration issues as quality, accessibility, cost effectiveness and patient and clinical acceptability.
• Clarifies the purpose and benefits of available standards, establishes the criteria to choose the best solution from the possible options, and provides guidelines for implementing the selected one.

The current version of the ITU-T Standardization Roadmap for Telemedicine has been approved (24 November 2006) as Study Group 16 Technical Paper and is freely downloadable from the ITU-T Technical Papers and Tutorials page.